October 10, 2012

“Legal
project management demands a new way of thinking about providing legal services,”
according to Al Dotson, a member of the Executive Committee at Bilzin
Sumberg and the practice group leader of its Government Relations and Land Development
Practice Group.

Before I started on our firm’s LPM initiative, I approached
new client engagements with a simple thought: ‘You, the client, have engaged me.
My hourly rate is X,’ and that was the end of the discussion. Now, I approach new engagements more in terms
of developing a mutual understanding with the client about the services we will
provide, the time it will take, the team required, the budget, and the relevant
reporting milestones.

Al explained these ideas when I conducted a panel discussion
with him, Jon Chassen and Mitch Widom at Bilzin’s annual partner retreat
last March. All three partners had just
finished a pilot test of LPM coaching with LegalBizDev’s Steve Barrett. For about three months, each lawyer had selected
real world matters to analyze and identified the key issues from our Legal Project Management Quick Reference
Guidethat were most critical in each situation. Then they reviewed the best practices described
in the book, and discussed exactly how to apply them to increase client value
and protect profitability.

At the retreat, all three reported benefits, but Al’s remarks
got the most attention because his LPM activities had already led to new
business in just a few short months. Dotson
represents real estate developers and contractors in highly complex matters
that involve a series of government regulatory agency approvals, and his developer
clients loved the approach because they use project management to run their own
businesses. One of them was so impressed by the legal
project plan Al had produced that he asked Bilzin to take on a significant
amount of new work.

I give a lot of LPM speeches at retreats, and I must say
that whenever it is possible to conduct a panel like this after my speech, it
always gets a better reaction. After all,
who would be more credible: an outside consultant, or a respected colleague they’ve
worked with for decades?

The reason Dotson first volunteered for the program was that

I was looking for better ways to organize my work, and to respond to clients’
and prospective clients’ desires for budgets.
Clients are looking for a way in which I can describe the work in
advance, both in terms of what the cost of the whole engagement will be, and in
terms of manageable segments of work.

Dotson described the LPM coaching he received as “spot-on”
in that it helped him organize his complex matters in terms of their component
parts, and to plan better for possible contingencies that may occur. “This coaching was far from a theoretical
exercise,” he said. “This was a discussion of specific matters that were before
me, and how to approach them.”

In weekly telephone sessions of about 30 minutes each,
Barrett walked Dotson through key problems and issues that he was encountering
in his practice, and how best practices from other firms might apply. Dotson then followed up by completing written
assignments based on LegalBizDev’s materials and the existing project
management literature.

As Dotson summed it up: “This coaching has been very
beneficial to me in client management and in client development. I believe that it applies to all areas of
law.”

Bilzin
Sumberg is a Florida-based firm with about 100 lawyers, with, according to its
web page, “a local footprint, a national presence and a global perspective.” As a result of the discussion at the
retreat, a number of other partners became interested in discussing how LPM
could help them.

All 51
partners were offered the option to complete the same three-month coaching
program that Al, Jon, and Mitch had received. Eight people signed up right after the retreat. Based on their results, another 14 signed
up a few months later, for a total of 25 partners in the program so far. This
represents almost half of the firm’s partners.

We have
coached lawyers from many firms on LPM using a variety of approaches and we
believe Bilzin has made more LPM progress, more quickly, than any other law
firm. The reason is that they had the
highest percentage of partners who made a commitment to our intensive three
month coaching program. (We work with
one AmLaw 100 firm that has put more total lawyers through this program, but
because they are so much larger, their percentage is lower.)

Many firms
have offered one-time training classes to a large number of lawyers, and a few
have spent years in intensive re-engineering of business processes. But as far as we have been able to determine,
no other firm on the planet has gotten such a large percentage of the partnership
actively involved so quickly in making immediate changes that benefit their
clients and their business.

If you believe everything you read on the web, you might
think that some law firms have completely mastered LPM. Those of us who work in the trenches have a
more realistic view. If I had to rate
the legal profession’s overall LPM progress on a scale of 1 to 10 over the last
few years, I’d give it only a 2 or a 3.
Some individual lawyers and practice groups deserve a much higher
rating, but when it comes to entire law firms there is a huge gap between
perception and reality. Perhaps
marketing departments have done too good a job of publicizing the successes of
lawyers who are using LPM, while overlooking those in the same firm who are disinterested
or actively opposed to it.

Afew
weeks ago, I wrote a post about a recent LPM survey from ALM Legal
Intelligence which reported a slow pace of LPM progress. This finding was not a surprise to anyone
who has ever worked at a law firm.
Insiders know how independent lawyers can be, and how hard it is to get
everyone moving in the same direction. When Patrick McKenna and Gerry Riskin wrote
one of the most influential books about managing law firms, there is a reason
the book was titled Herding Cats.

The intensive LPM coaching approach works because each
lawyer focuses on immediate ways to directly benefit their individual practice. And when it works, they tell their colleagues.

Next week, we will discuss some of the changes that have occurred
in other practice groups after Bilzin’s retreat.